‘global influenza vaccine manufacturing capacity is insufficient to meet demand in a pandemic and […] in the absence of a multilateral system of benefit sharing, some Member States, particularly developing countries, can neither afford nor access the vaccines’

In other words, ‘there isn’t enough vaccine to go around, poorer countries will be priced out of the market, and millions will die in the event of a pandemic’. Basically, this passage amounts to the blackmailing of developing countries into accepting the WHO’s particular ‘virus sharing’ system. Indonesia has felt the need to withhold virus samples from the WHO in protest of the current system, so what does this system entail?

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Well, despite the report ostensibly purporting to recognise ‘the sovereign right of States over their biological resources’ [i.e. viruses found within their national borders), it later goes on to demand that: ‘member states agree to routinely provide [to the WHO] clinical specimens or viruses from all human cases of H5N1 and other influenza viruses of human pandemic potential in a timely fashion’. Additionally, fees can not be charged for the provision to the WHO of these viruses (which in the report are euphemistically - and laughably - termed ‘pandemic influenza preparedness biological materials’).

So how will poorer UN member states get hold of the vaccine? Not to worry, the WHO will ‘provide affordable loans to developing and least-developed countries to support procurement of vaccines and associated equipment’. Hurrah, endlessly spiralling debts, on top of those already owed to the rich nations. (See John Pilger’s excellent documentary War By Other Means on the subject of debt as a political weapon). Obviously these loans, via compound interest, inevitably result in an overall transfer of wealth from debtor to creditor - how is this going to help improve health conditions in poor countries?

All in all the poor countries lose:

Valuable biological commodities (i.e. viruses). Specimens of a virus are necessary in order to produce the specific vaccine for that virus - and vaccines are clearly inordinately valuable in the case of an outbreak.

The right to conduct their own scientific studies and/or produce their own vaccines

The proportion of their future GNP that must be spent repaying the loans and their compound interest.

In amongst this racketeering, powerful pharmaceutical companies are able to obtain monopolies on vaccine production, and subsequently hold the governments of poor yet sovereign nations to ransom.

In 1997, Donald Rumsfeld was appointed Chairman of the Board of Gilead Sciences, a company which a year earlier had developed ‘Tamiflu’, originally a drug for AIDS and later marketed as a vaccine for H5N1 avian flu. Upon becoming US Defence Secretary in 2001, he ordered $1 billion worth of Tamiflu to be bought and injected into US soldiers as a ‘precaution’. At the time, Rumsfeld was the principal stockholder of Gilead Sciences. Worse still, it later emerged that Tamiflu was not even effective as a H5N1 vaccine.

Another salient political point regarding the monopolisation of viruses, is of course their potential for use in ‘germ warfare’. Imagine being the leader of a developing nation, under the constant threat of an avian flu pandemic. You know that the WHO and major pharmaceutical companies are actively experimenting with and genetically modifying viruses. (The WHO report explicitly states this; indeed it is a necessary part of pre-emptively countering potential virus mutations with vaccines - the new viruses must first be created). Furthermore, the WHO is demanding that you surrender any clinical specimens found within your borders, or risk losing UN membership. If an outbreak did occur in your country, how could anyone tell the difference between a germ warfare attack and a natural outbreak?

And to those who would dismiss the potential use of chemical/biological weapons by developed nations - why did George W. Bush
oppose an international Biological and Toxic Weapons Protocol in 2001? Why did the biological weaponry research watchdog The Sunshine Project report in 2003 that US Army scientists were recreating the 1918 Spanish Flu virus under laboratory conditions?

And the more suspicious of the US Army you are, the more likely you are to draw connections to things like Henry Kissinger’s 1974 ‘National Security Memorandum 200: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth For U.S. Security and Overseas Interests‘ (declassified in 1989 and now available here), which discusses uncontrolled population growth in foreign nations as being a threat to national security and the US control of foreign resources, as well as suggesting various ways in which to surreptitiously depopulate certain areas.